Ned Rorem: American Composer and Diarist

Confession: it took me a very long time to learn to appreciate the works of Ned Rorem.

Sure, my university voice teachers dutifully assigned all their students his well-crafted art songs, which I dutifully sang (and even assigned to my own vocal students in future years). While undeniably high-quality work, it hit my young ears as a bit too academic, too conservative, and just too far away from the sonics thrown down by my experimental music heroes. Exceptionally beautiful, but just not my thing at all.

I carried this attitude well into my late-20’s when — as a graduate student in conducting at UT Austin — I was invited by my colleague Stacy Weger to sing as chorister and soloist on his doctoral recital, the centerpiece of which would be Rorem’s Pilgrim Strangers. Written to excerpted texts from the Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, Pilgrim Strangers is an epic — and often brutal — account of the poet’s direct witness account of the carnage observed while visiting Union military hospitals during the Civil War. Anti-war to the extreme, PS is a composition in direct lineage with two of my favorite musical works: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem. Up until this point in my life, I viewed Rorem as a composer with absolutely zero edge… this composition immediately sat my mistaken notion down and gave it a stern talking to.

It turns out I was a huge Ned Rorem fan. I just hadn’t sorted that out yet.

In addition to being a wildly prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Rorem was also also a famous writer diarist. His infamous Paris Diary (1966) chronicled in explicit terms the life of a gay man decades before most of society was ready to accept — or even discuss — the concept of queerness.

Today, we lost Ned Rorem at age 99. The man may be gone, but his words and music will live on forever.

Rest In Peace.